Concluding Remarks

Making the Social World: The Structure of

Human Civilization
John Searle

Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780195396171
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195396171.001.0001

Concluding Remarks
The Ontological Foundations of the Social Sciences

John R. Searle

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195396171.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords

This concluding chapter aims to provide a reasonable analysis of social ontology
which may be functional in future studies of the social sciences. It argues that
the comprehension of the basic ontology of any subject area leads to a more
profound understanding of the important affairs within that subject. That being
said, this book examines the prevalent structure present in the general human
social-institutional reality, which leads to the idea that various social sciences,
like economics and sociology, are not entirely different from each other and must
be viewed with transparency.

Keywords:   ontology, social ontology, social sciences, social-institutional reality, sociology, economics

Suppose I am right that human society is largely constituted by distinctive

institutional structures that create and distribute deontic power relationships by
assigning status functions, and with those status functions differing social roles,
in the society. What implications, if any, does that account have for actual
research in the social sciences? I guess the short answer is that I don’t really
know. It is impossible to tell in advance what is going to be useful for actual
research. It seems that there are many areas of social science research in which,
at least in principle, it is not necessary to understand the foundational issues.
So, for example, when I lectured on these subjects at the Memorial for Pierre
Bourdieu in Paris, one of the other participants, an American sociologist
specializing in the sociology of labor unions, told me that his work began where
mine ended. And I take it he meant that it is not necessary for him to know the

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Concluding Remarks

ontological foundations of trade unionism. All he has to understand is the actual

operations of particular historically situated organizations. The picture I think he
had was that, just as a geologist might study the movements of tectonic plates
without understanding the details of atomic physics, so he might study the
movements of trade unions without understanding the details of social ontology.
He may be right about that. My instinct, though, is to think that it is always a
good idea to understand the foundational issues. It is much more plausible to me
to think that an understanding of the basic ontology of any discipline will deepen
the understanding of issues within that discipline. In any case, I am not in this
book attempting to provide a philosophy of existing social sciences but to offer a
logical analysis of the fundamental ontology of the (p.201) entities studied by
the social sciences. This may—or may not—prove useful to the social sciences of
the future.

When I studied economics as an undergraduate at Oxford, none of my teachers

worried about the ontological presuppositions of the investigation. We were
taught that Savings equals Investment (S = I) in the same tone of voice that in
physics one would be taught that Force equals Mass times Acceleration (F =
MA). We discovered that marginal cost equals marginal revenue in the same way
that one might discover that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.
Economic realities were treated as part of the realities of the scientifically
investigatable world. Earlier, when I took a course in sociology at Wisconsin,
there was no mention of the foundational ontological issues. As I said earlier, I
think it is sometimes possible to do good research without worrying about the
ontological issues, but the whole investigation gets a greater depth if one is
acutely conscious of the ontology of the phenomena being investigated. It is, for
example, a mistake to treat money and other such instruments as if they were
natural phenomena like the phenomena studied in physics, chemistry, and
biology. The recent economic crisis makes it clear that they are products of
massive fantasy. As long as everyone shares the fantasy and has confidence in it,
the system will work just fine. But when some of the fantasies cease to be
believable, as happened with the subprime mortgage instruments, then the
whole system begins to unravel. I welcome the recent revival of interest in
institutional economics.1

This book makes (at least) three very strong claims. It is important to state them
in as strong a version as possible because that makes them easier to refute. The
three claims are first, all of human institutional reality, and in that sense nearly
all of human civilization, is created in its initial existence and maintained in its
continued existence by a single, logico-linguistic operation. Second, we can state
exactly what that operation is. It is a Status Function Declaration. And third, the
enormous diversity and complexity of human civilization is explained by the fact
that that operation is not restricted in subject matter and can be applied over
and over in a recursive fashion, is often applied to the outcomes of earlier

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Concluding Remarks

applications and with various and interlocking subject matters, to create all of
the complex structures of actual human societies.

A consequence of the investigation is that all of human social–institutional reality

has a common underlying structure. Now if this is right, it is a mistake (p.202)
to treat different branches of the social sciences, such as sociology and
economics, for example, as if they dealt with fundamentally different subject
matters. The different social sciences ought to be completely transparent to
each other. All the strange and wonderful diverse human institutions are cases of
shaping and reshaping the distribution of power by repeated applications of
specific forms of linguistic representation, Status Function Declarations. I
considered earlier the possibility that maybe one does not have to know much
atomic physics to be a good geologist. All the same, in all natural sciences you
have to understand that everything has an atomic structure. I am suggesting
that a full understanding of the ontology of the subjects studied by the social
sciences requires an understanding of the structure I have tried to describe.

I would not wish to overdraw the analogy between the social sciences and the
natural sciences; there is nothing reductionist about my account. But if the
account is correct, then all of the different social sciences are dealing with a
power structure common to all of social reality, and I have tried to describe the
basic mechanisms by which that power structure is created and maintained.

Notes:
(1.) Lawson, Tony, Economics and Reality, New York: Routledge, 1997.

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